The study says that, for the US, 9% of people are at "high risk" of automated out of a job. (That probably means "replaceable right now".) But 38% of people are potentially replaceable.
There's an assumption in the OECD report that the entire job of a human must be replaced. But that's not how automation works. We're seeing this in the more advanced law firms. What used to take a senior attorney, a few junior attorneys, a large number of paralegals, and a big clerical staff can now be done by one attorney, one paralegal, and a lot of software and databases. The OECD study claims that the risk to people with high levels of education is almost nil. Ask any newly graduated lawyer trying to get a job.
That's the fundamental flaw in this study - it assumes one for one replacement. What really happens is that the workflow is restructured so that fewer people and more hardware are involved.
[1] http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/download/5jlz9h56dvq7...
On the other hand, even 10% replacement of an industry (9 workers doing what 10 workers do now) is a big deal, and there are a lot of careers (legal, HR, document handling) that should expect to see values like 75% replacement. I can't think why someone would (in good faith) treat a one-to-one statistic as the whole of the answer here.
Compared to building an autonomous truck, autonomous refueling seems like the easy part.
Not really - all AV trucks will be owned by consolidated corporations, think Uber for trucks. These corporations will have service centers in strategic location, AV trucks will come for refueling to these centers.
Like accountants. Excel and other software resolved a ton of their work. You didn't see a collapse in the number accountants. They just crunch more numbers, do more analysis.
uber made taxi's more efficient and I now ride in one 10X as often.
>We're seeing this in the more advanced law firms. What used to take a senior attorney, a few junior attorneys, a large number of paralegals, and a big clerical staff can now be done by one attorney, one paralegal, and a lot of software and databases. The OECD study claims that the risk to people with high levels of education is almost nil. Ask any newly graduated lawyer trying to get a job.
Software has barely put any lawyers out of a job. There have been staff cuts but that is more because babyboomer and older attorneys didn't know to word process. WordPerect (and now Word) are the reason legal secretaries are a dying profession. GenX and Millenial attorneys find it easier to it themselves.
Like accountants, a lot of this increased efficiency just leads to doing more work to make the end product better. You used to have research cases in books. This sounds inefficient, but it's actually not that bad. The book sellers summarize and catalog cases. You look up the issue and see what cases there are, read them and that is that.
Now, it's all done in digital databases. But it's not really faster. The digital databases still require a person to read the case, summarize, and catalog it. But it also allows you to read cases that weren't published. So it's now possible to find better cases, but you gotta spend the time reading it. So instead of spending an hour to get 10 cases sort on point, you have access to every case. But it takes well over an hour to get the perfect case. You get the better case, but you spent more time. Maybe you'd need a team of 50 lawers to find that case in the 1970s, but nobody would actually do that.
Ross--that startup claiming to be an AI lawyer--is spamming legal news with press releases vaguely claiming it can do all of that instantaneously. I sincerely doubt it. There is a reason they don't have a demo on their website.
The only software that I know that is doing what I'd consider legal work is the machine learning applied to document review--called predictive coding. But even that is only a response to the massive amount of information generated in digital offices. Workplaces produce many times more emails and documents than they did 40 years ago. E-discover exploded in the late 90's and early 2000's.
And even that work had already been outsourced to contractors who hired reviewers--often in India--to do the big projects. It's reduced some legal jobs, but only jobs that were created by technology. You can't apply the machine learning to smaller sets of documents since there isn't enough data to learn from.
The reason the legal market crashed in 2008 is because the M&A stopped and because those mortgage backed securities required a ton of legal work. And then the overall recession made companies sensitive to legal bills.
Newly graduated lawyers had a hard time finding a job even when the market for corporate lawyers was hot. Because tons of schools opened up law schools to cash in. They flooded the market with people who had no business being a lawyer. Even in 2005, the median law grad made less money than a programmer.
edit: wow I really ranted here. embarassing. I'm actually putting off doing document review because it's boring. I wish I had an AI that could do it for me.
The lawyer industry as it is, is I think a form of archaism. In most transactions there is zero justification to custom make a contract. Most sales of houses and businesses have exactly the same terms and the only reason you need lawyers to read and customize contracts is because other lawyers customized contracts previously and someone has to do the due dilligence of figuring out what they did. I am sure you could design a robust legal system with simple laws, where citizen do not need an expert to understand their rights and obligations, and where everyone would use standardised contracts for the quasi totality of transactions.
In fact it is a bit shocking that a common citizen cannot possibly understand the hundreds of thousands of pages of law and jurisprudence they he is required to comply with and needs to pay (dearly) an expert to do that for him.
Also, as for your claim that "works fills the available time", what about competition, new models of billing(fixed-fee), etc ?
I come here primarily for the rants :-)
You learn interesting things and it sparks ideas.
Rant on Mr Rhino!
Imagine being able to dictate grounds for relief, and have the machine draft the paperwork for you, ready to sign/witness and file.
Imagine not having to pay a lawyer $400/hour to answer what should be a simple question.
Imagine being able to have computer-based training about the acts/statutes you are currently referencing in your process.
I can't wait.
Now imagine what would happen if common law in the US was abanonded in favor of civil law, so that the data was a book of laws, rather than a history of cases...
Is this actually a global thing? I mean does this apply to smaller cities as well?
In truth there is a nearly infinite amount of work that needs doing. We just get by with most of the work not being done. Just go back in time and think about all the work that wasn't being done before various jobs existed. There used to be a time before the video games industry existed, there was a time before the movie industry existed, there was a time before people could support themselves as authors or journalists or watch-makers.
Are we going to live in some sort of world where there's a pool of unused labor and people just sit around thinking "whelp, it's a shame there's literally nothing, no possible thing, for them to do, oh well"? Of course not, that's a fantasy that's based on a complete misperception of economics. No matter how much we automate there will always be work for people to do. The more important question is how equitably they'll be compensated for that work and whether or not our education system is adequate for the world as it exists.
Which has almost certainly been a factor in what's been happening to labor since the 1980s, who have seen their wages remain stagnant and job security fall through the floor (especially for those under 30) while the economy and productivity continues to grow and grow. This is, I would say, fairly obviously a bad thing, and requires a lot of rethink in order to makeup for the extreme power imbalances and iniquities at play, but very little of substance has been done about it so far.
And if it isn't, then those people who've been automated out of a job will find something to do, such as crime.
We've gone through radical change before.
Would seem that the 'low qualified' worker is the prevailing demographic. So that alone should make the risk, as an overall percentage, much higher than 10.
FWIW, my employer has been targeting all levels of workers for past several years. HR is gone, warehouse people down 65%, engineering down 40%, logistics down 30%, production down 35%. Mostly through process automation, some through robotics, and some through out-sourcing. And there has been a careful and selective 'firing' of customers. Both Net and Gross have significantly increased for three years. As for me, just sit here and write the code to do some of this. Am I evil?
I do see sweeping statements about rebuilding entire infrastructures in order to accommodate robots (ie doing away with roadside safety inspections or eliminating boarder crossings). Every day I see ships come into harbour. Creating an autopilot for a ship is simple compared to one for a trucks. Yet every day a speedboat heads out to deliver the harbour pilot, and tugboat captains stand guard as tankers approach the bridge. Automation has failed to remove any of those jobs. The engine room crews may be a little smaller than in days past but the bridge crews, the drivers, are still there. We wouldn't have it any other way.
And aircraft ... and trains ...
One is the evolution of work and jobs over time. As a pretty relevant example, the migration of shopping to "online" vs in store means two things; First you don't need the goods in a metro area, and second you need to get them to the customers. If you replace all current "shopping" traffic with "delivery" traffic it really cuts into the buyer's experience (waiting for delivery) but drone delivery allows the delivery component to scale. Of course drone delivery has to be reasonably local, but needn't be closer than a 10 miles or so, that means a "town" outside of the city that is well served by cargo container delivery can then provide the point where bulk delivery switches to individual delivery. That implies a economies with the movement of containers above and beyond the current system of trains and trucks. Either additional rail networks or lots more trucks. If those trucks are automatable, well that helps as well.
So if we imagine some "delivery only" roads where only robotic trucks are allowed, that lead to warehouses where end product dispersal is done, to smaller warehouses where local delivery can be queued/expedited. Walk that backwards to figure out the things you need in order to deploy that.
At which point it would be interesting to evaluate the energy efficiency of that system over the current one to make sure what you get back in efficiency by automation you don't spend on additional energy.
This is possible but unlikely. There have been numerous plans in the past to build such large infrastructure. Like large pneumatic tubes to every house for deliveries. It usually turned out to be too expensive to build.
Starting small, consider an autonomous truck that uses electricity like a city bus to move a container along a single lane protected from other traffic. You have one end in the port of Oakland (busy container terminal) and the other in a distribution warehouse outside Livermore (lots of open space, access to freeways and rail). Now one has to price out the cost savings of having containers appear automatically in a transhipping location without burning diesel or getting stuck in traffic.
You save a bit on the driver, you save more on the gas, and you take roads off the freeway which will help you to encourage local municipalities to give you easements for your autobot trucks to drive on.
It would be fun to sit down with a trans-shipper and find out their costs and whether or not you could save them time and effort.
> Overall, we find that, on average across the 21 OECD countries, 9 % of jobs are automatable.
As in, right freaking now? Blimey, what about the next few decades, then? Not to mention that 9% is already a big number.
That being said, the more automation the better. We just need something better than punishing the jobless with poverty.
The study should be thought of as valid only short-term.
Beside, with outsourcing to China, there aren't that many manufacturing jobs left in the US and Europe for robots to take anyway. I think where robots will have a huge potential is for domestic tasks: cleaning your home, taking parcels while you're away, preparing food, doing the laundry and ironing. A home robot that would do all that would have a huge market. But they are not going to replace an existing workforce, rather free up time for women (who still predominantly bear the burden of these tasks) and enable them to focus on their career.
I think there could be another wave of automation in the service industry, but it wouldn't be robots, just software. Today there are a huge number of manual tasks done in the service industry: processing invoices, preparing financial accounts, payslips, paying a lawyer to rewrite the same contract over and over, etc. Some of that can be automated by outsourcing it to a provider who has the means to automate it, but a huge fraction is just too specific, customized to a business, to justify paying for an IT team to build software for it. The way to automate it is for business people to build their own automation. In a way Microsoft Office has done partially that (an accountant with Excel has the productivity of 50 accountants from the 50s) but I think we can gain another order of magnitude of productivity by enable people to code. For that, basic coding skills should be widely deployed, in a very simple and highly productive language. And I am not convinced this language already exists.
>OECD Working Papers should not be reported as representing the official views of the OECD or of its member countries.
And yet they always are.
Numbers wise, even if Frey and Osborne's supposedly apocalyptic numbers are correct that's 47% job destruction over 20+ years, or roughly 2.35% per annum. Since we already destroy between 10% and 15% [0] of jobs annually (depending on where you are and who's doing the measuring) this really doesn't represent that big a shift. Given some of this is likely due to automation anyway, the lower figures given in this paper would barely register.
- The number of people occupied per industry is inversely proportional to the number of industries in existence.
- The barrier to entry is also inversely proportional to the number of industries in existence.
The process for every new industry generally goes something like this:
- Stage 1: mostly makers (100%)
- Stage 2: some makers (25%) + some operators of some tech that raises general efficiency (25%) (50% slowly moves to some new industry)
- Stage 3: few makers (5%) + some operators (10%) + some supervisors of some autonomous tech that maximizes efficiency (10%) (25% slowly moves to some new industry)
Was this process historically painless and ultra efficient? No! Did it do the job again and again with some acceptable level of efficiency? Yes!
The argument that this time is different this will stop working is getting stronger and stronger.
I personally think that is not the case. With some pain that require good policy, up and downs and so on this is the way we operate, we adapt.
Take prostitution (the oldest job in the world!), the next thing is robots yes, but also cam girls. Lower barrier to entry and maybe even bigger industry with lots of specialization.
And next thing for cam girls? Is of course virtual cam girls but also avatar builders/modelers/players even lower barrier to entry and potentially bigger industry and so on.
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[0] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2941272/emerging-techno...
We can see rapid improvement of self-driving technology. For sure, tech moves into mainstream more slowly than we generally imagine it will, but the sheer numbers of persons who could be displaced make even a relatively protracted implementation a big problem. Drive through Mountain View, Ca. on any given day and you'll see multiple Google autonomous vehicles. Uber, Apple, Tesla, GM, Volvo, .. most major auto companies, some minor companies and even non-auto companies are working on it with a high level of focus.
Two aspects of this movement may inhibit widespread deployment and slow the rate of robotic vehicles subsuming human jobs:
- The pace of legislation and the attending regulatory infrastructure. Governments are cooperating for the most part, likely attracted by the prospect of safer transportation in general. So I think this will not materially delay the roll out.
- The dilution of talent as these efforts compete for technologists may slow the progress of all of them, unless individual engineering leaders can attract and retain the top people.
The numbers look like this (2014), [1], [2], [3], [4]:
233,700 Taxi
665,000 Bus
1,797,700 Semi/Tractor-Trailer
1,330,000 Delivery
In 2014, that was roughly 4 million people who make a living driving. And the 2 most valuable companies in the world, Google and Apple, are working very hard to put these drivers out of work. What makes it particularly difficult is that these workers are typically uneducated and will have no place to go except minimum wage service jobs. Moreover, many former manufacturing workers took these driving jobs as a downgrade to income. And it looks like they have another target on their back.
Where do they go from here? Speaking for myself, I think the country has a moral obligation to make some accommodation and not just wave our hands a bit and say 'oh, they'll be fine'.
[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/ta...
[2] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/bu...
[3] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/he...
[4] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/de...
These are all facets of the same problem, and it's everywhere.
The world has already passed peak job. Our task as programmer has always been to automate everything, including ourselves.
Someone will soon build a totally modular, reconfigurable intelligent factory. An autofac, power and raw materials go in and anything and everything comes out the other side. For large classes of goods, this is an engineering problem, not a science problem.
>Arntz, et al. argue that the estimated share of “jobs at risk” must not be equated with actual or expected employment losses from technological advances for three reasons.
So in other words, the title is false. Actual employment loss is what is at issue here.
>The utilisation of new technologies is a slow process, due to economic, legal and societal hurdles, so that technological substitution often does not take place as expected.
The first ridiculous assertion. Jobs wont be destroyed because it will take a long time to destroy them!
>Even if new technologies are introduced, workers can adjust to changing technological endowments by switching tasks, thus preventing technological unemployment.
Asinine assertion #2. People will just get new jobs when robots take their jobs! (of course what new jobs will be available is left unsaid).
>Technological change also generates additional jobs through demand for new technologies and through higher competitiveness.
Asinine assertion #3, virtually the same as #2. What new jobs will be created by the automated vehicles that put tens of millions of drivers out of work?
This article reads very much like the tripe offered by those who continue to argue that NAFTA and related "free trade deals" are actually good for workers.
There's real, interesting stuff to be said about automation and substitution effects - it is not to be found here. Yet another piece parroting the claim that displaced workers find new jobs adds nothing to the conversation. Look up any of the Tech Review debates, or if you're truly interested check out the pieces the OECD incorrectly claims to debunk.
'Asinine' is exactly the word, although I might choose "assuming the consequent" if I'm allowed to use a phrase. When the entire debate is over whether this time is different, whether new jobs will actually become available, it's impressively dull-witted to dismiss the argument by assuming the desired result.
Does anyone today feel as though we've lost half of our jobs to mechanized farming? Not really, it allowed other industries like entertainment to flourish. Now that less of us have to do X, we can do more Y. I think it's absolutely a valid point to say "job loss will be slow enough that people will be able to adapt."
I honestly don't get the "robots will take our jobs" thing. It's sort of like "with more technology people will work less" - which has thus far proven to not be the case. People will always find more work to do, more ways to convince other people to spend money (and since the sales of X are now supporting less people, more money is freed up for Y).
The number of "jobs" available to a given population isn't really a function of the level of automation. It's a function of who is in control of capital/wealth and how that wealth flows between entities. Thanks to the automation we've already developed, we can already technically afford to provide everyone (in the US) with a basic income for the "job" of simply existing. Or we could place a high(er) tax on top earners and use that to double the minimum wage and split those jobs in half. Boom, look at all those new jobs created simply by a policy change. We just have collectively not chosen to do those things. Jobs are a red herring. We don't "need jobs" that are being destroyed by automation. The automation is adding value, not destroying it. We just have a setup where a small number of people are capturing most of that value. What we need are socioeconomic policies that even out that distribution.
Someone else phrased it best, I read it from an HN user but they may have been using someone else's argument. Paraphrasing here:
"Machines made physical labor easier, requiring fewer people to do physical labor. Those people moved to doing mental labor. Now machines are replacing mental tasks too. Where can people go when fewer of them are needed for mental tasks?"
The last remaining type of labor would be creative labor. Writing, music, performance. Things machines either still struggle at or won't be able to perform until we have humanoids that move fluidly. Even then, humans seem to prefer humans performing "artsy" things - based on criticisms I've seen of robots who create art (mostly music and drawings).
Art also, notoriously, doesn't pay very well for all but a small fraction of artists. What happens when this market is over-saturated because it is the only job left for large parts of the population?
There's something to be said about this.
If there is unmet demand for something those people can do [1], and automation makes them more productive, and does not completely replace them; then reducing the price of those people work (by increased productivity) will make more jobs appear.
Note there are 3 "if"s there. I doubt many workers will see those three met for them.
[1] That means, people want more of it. Economists normally take this fact from granted, but it is not.
The hard question is why that automation will not result in the creation of new industries, which themselves will create new jobs. This has happened throughout human history. To say that won't happen anymore is a high bar.
That's why the pace of change does matter. If jobs are destroyed much faster than they are created, then there might be social unrest in the lag.
In a decade or two there will be a heck of a lot of middle-age people hopelessly outpaced by the rate of change. 10 years after that, even young people won't be able to keep up.
